Taiwan Ho! Forums

Anyone bought a hard drive recently? One of my external drives has begun making the click of death so I must replace it soon.

I have seen a 1TB Buffalo DriveStation for NT$2,888 which seems reasonable (it's an all in one 3.5" USB2 external drive - can't be doing with faffing around with housing) but I haven't looked very hard.

A hard disk drive[2] (HDD) is a non-volatile, random access device for digital data. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the platters.

Introduced by IBM in 1956, hard disk drives have fallen in cost and physical size over the years while dramatically increasing in capacity. Hard disk drives have been the dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s.[3] They have maintained this position because advances in their areal recording density have kept pace with the requirements for secondary storage.[3] Today's HDDs operate on high-speed serial interfaces; i.e., serial ATA (SATA) or serial attached SCSI (SAS).

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Thanks

copy and paste strikes again en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

Nice. Spam responds to your note on spam. I'm not even going to mention the spelling.

Seeing as this topic has come back, now under NT$3,500 for 2TB. Backing up is a good thing.

I learned this the hard way. From my understanding, hard drives in laptops are particularly prone to failure. By the way, is anyone backing up in the cloud? I personally am still using an external hard drive but have been thinking maybe this is not necessary nowadays with memory available for free in the cloud.

I am curious about the cloud. It seems like more and more people are keeping their music and other files in the cloud, and they can have access to it whenever they wish. Where are you thinking about backing up, Nagunae?

I just broke my HD seting the lappy down too hard...sad as ALL my photos of our family trips were on it. Some backed up on disks, some not. Thankfully I got the pix back, but ALL the dl Ive done, 80gig plus...gone

ha...

You can search "cloud storage" and find some good free and paid services out there. We've all heard of Dropbox. Also, you can even use your Gmail to store things. Technically, this is also cloud storage but probably not the best way to store a large number of files. I haven't done this yet so my information is very basic. I'm sure there are others who are using cloud storage and have some good advice to give.

I think it won't be long before all laptops will be using flash drives. Solid state is so much better than spinning discs. It's like the difference between an LED lamp and a compact fluorescent bulb. You can drop an LED lamp without hurting it but you probably shouldn't do that with a compact fluorescent bulb. I think it won't be long before people will be wondering what the hell we were doing with these hard drives with spinning platters and heads, etc.

Nearly all Internet service providers offer much faster download speed than upload speed. Consider this carefully when you choose cloud backup. It can take WEEKS to get your first full backup out there.

Two of my systems use Carbonite and one of them has 126 Gig backed up. It took about three weeks to move all that data out and I hate to think how long it would take to get it all back.

I have a separate server here at home and I replicate my 2 TB storage drive to another 2 TB across a 1 Gig Ethernet connection.

My laptop is currently using F-Secure cloud backup (I'm testing that service.) It's pretty slow too. For the laptop, I use and old 1/2 TB IDE drive in an external case and make full system backups.

So far, my favorite backup program is Acronis Home which also gives me a bootable CD to take a total backup or do a total restore to bare metal.

(I have a friend near London who has a 100MEG Internet pipe so he can use cloud backup very efficiently.)

Think before you buy!

Everyone has a different idea of "won't be long" but I'm not holding my breath. Flash is still VERY expensive and has significant limits on how many times you can rewrite the data. They have a much SHORTER service life than HDD.

In view of your previous post, my guess is that you are more of an expert in this area than I am! Having said that, though, I think a solid-state drive would be a very good way to perform backup, in view of the limited write/erase cycles involved with the way most people use backup memory (for example, I pull my external hard drive out about once a month- that almost sounds x-rated- for backing up the memory on my laptop.) Perhaps this IS the biggest issue, though, since in my view, cost will come down over time.

Those SD cards are getting more and more powerful. I bought a magazine for about 300NT last week just because they had a free 4 GB SD card in it. I can fit about a thousand MP3s on it and put it in my car and I don't have to worry about discs skipping anymore. They go up to 64 GB I think maybe higher.

But every time they increase the memory, the programs get that much bigger.

I've recently bought a Transcend HDD, can't exactly remember the model number. It works pretty well, so I can recommend this brand to anyone. I'm not a big specialist in all this stuff, so when I was choosing I just looked at the price and the design. But now I'm glad my choice was successful.